Mel Kalfus Remembered

Friends of Alma and Mel Kalfus, and scholars of history and psychohistory, have lost a dear friend and a scholar of breadth, creativity, and integrity with the death of Mel Kalfus. He was a judicious psychohistorian whose work was always solidly rooted in traditional standards of historiography and in careful attention to the details of primary sources.

I was privileged to know Mel from the early 1980s when we began a correspondence on the nature, merits, and possibilities of doing psychohistory, a friendship that saw him emerge as an expert on 19^th-century America, New York City, Wagner, and what he was fond of calling, “the psychology of the German-Jewish connection.” His presentation at my college on that theme, as part of a psychohistory lecture series open to the public, was previewed in the Rockland County Journal News (with photo) and was presented to an overflow audience including several local business and political leaders. He did this while maintaining a full schedule at his advertising firm, researching and writing his doctoral dissertation, and serving the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) in several capacities. First as a dedicated and enthusiastic IPA president, and then as long-time IPA treasurer, where he helped set the Association on the road to fiscal responsibility, Mel contributed significantly to the maintenance of psychohistorical organization. I was delighted when he won his long-wished-for PhD in history from NYU and even more delighted when the dissertation was published by NYU Press as Frederick Law Olmsted: Passion of a Public Artist. (1990)

Mel has made a lasting contribution to my own teaching, as every semester I tell my classes the same story, one Mel once shared with me, an episode which hopefully helps some of my students understand a little better the power of denial, rationalization, and irrationality. Mel was having lunch with his business associates (on Fifth Avenue at the Top of the Sixes, I believe) when the conversation turned to a tragic event that had happened nearby just a few days before. Debris from a skyscraper had begun falling onto a midtown street; while nearly everyone ran for cover, one person ran into the street, looked up, and was killed. As the luncheon conversation turned to the recent event, and his business associates commented on the stupidity of the victim, Mel risked the suggestion that the accident wasn’t so accidental, that perhaps the victim harbored some kind of unconscious death wish which was being spontaneously, and unconsciously, acted out. There was silence. Then someone said, “The unconscious? [pause] There’s no such thing as the unconscious.” Everyone except Mel agreed. Within minutes, Mel reported, the table conversation turned to the possibilities of precognition, out-of-body experiences, past life readings, reincarnation, “death-in-life” experiences, “proof” for the existence of the soul and an afterlife, and UFO sightings and alien abductions. Someone said, “Hey … there might be something to this stuff.”

I well remember Mel’s courage during his

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successful battle against a serious cancer some years ago. Thoughts of Mel’s courage, as well as several cheery telephone calls, helped sustain me though my own recent illnesses. One wants to say much more but there comes a moment when one must end at least the public tribute with “Thanks for everything, Mel.”

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